Foucault, power and participation

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Foucault, power and participation

• Dr. Michael Gallagher
• School of Social and Political Studies,
  University of Edinburgh

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Why Foucault?

• After all, he is widely accepted
• but perhaps not widely understood?
• Getting to grips with his understanding of power
  may help to make sense of the ambivalence of
  participation

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Polarised thinking?

• Participation should be empowering, enable
  childrens voices to be heard, a radical strategy
  for change
• Participation is limited, tokenistic,
  ineffectual, not leading to any real change
• I think participation is more ambivalent than this

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A dubious visual metaphor

• Advocates of childrens participation want to see
  a Monet (Habermassian harmony)
• When they look, what they find is a Goya
  (Machiavellian/Orwellian gloom)
• What Im seeing is a Pollock (Foucaultian/Nietzsch
  ean chaos)

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Monet
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Goya
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Pollock
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Power for Foucault

• A form of action, not a commodity
• Exercised not possessed
• Polyvalent and diverse
• Everyday - actions upon actions
• Not tied to conscious intentions
• Scale - large powers (structures) depend on small
  powers (agency), and vice versa

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Implications for childrens participation

• Participation is strategic and tactical -
  organised chaos
• Need to look at how power is exercised
• Need to look at relationships between scales
• Cant prevent liberty, and cant prescribe it
  either unpredictability and chaos
• What is the relationship between participation
  and other political tactics subversion, refusal,
  critique, demonstration, protest, collective
  action, direct action?

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Difference and repetition minimalist music

• 20th century minimalism Phillip Glass, Terry
  Riley, Steve Reich, John Adams
• Music as a way of illustrating concepts
• Reich illustrates relationship between difference
  repetition

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